Sorry about your budget gap, but why the hell did you have winter thermostat settings above 68°? Even — even — if you have money to burn, you should want to keep temperatures at least that low for health and comfort. And I do not believe that the people who run Yale think that there's such a thing as anthropogenic global warming worth worrying a damn about. In fact, if you actually thought cutting carbon emissions was important, your thermostats would already be at 62° or lower. If you thought AGW is an emergency — of the sort Al Gore warns us about —you'd set the thermostat at 52° or lower.

Good lord, you're firing people from their jobs! Why are you still roasting the place to 68°?!

Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?

84 comments:

Probably it means that the thermometers will be set to be restricted to no more than 68 degrees, whereas before they had no restrictions?I, whom hail from the Warm West, have always been amazed by the Easterners who come in from the snow and set their houses at 80 degrees. Winter out East isn't too cold for me, it's too hot for me.

Walden Pond was the famous isolation place allowing the exercise of the creative resources of a mind. No Radio, no cable and no Internet, no I-Phones to react to...just sitting and reading and meditating and imagining followed by writing down thoughts. Sounds downright human. Yale needs to teach that lifestyle. The funny thing is that teaching more students cost more money than the extra tuition recieved for them, so the more students, the more money the college loses.

Or get the kit from Menard's that lets you use your hairdryer to melt the saran-wrap type stuff over the windows and get a nice tight seal.

If only there were a way to insulate our 1928 brick and plaster house. Heat just leaks out. So we have 58-64 degrees no matter what. I just wear a lot of clothes and stay kind of plump. We're chubby in Wisconsin because the food is fabulous (hell, Kopps Frozen Custard and fried cheese curds!) and because why should we waste all our money sending it to WE Energies?

Here in AZ, where's it's not only a dry heat but a dry chill, we keep our thermostat at 70 in the winter because I freeze otherwise. (In the summer, we keep it at 80, maybe 79.) When I lived in MA, I had one of those rickety 100+year-old farmhouses but still kept the thermostat at 65 when I was home and awake, lower when I was at work or overnight. I had lots of wool sweaters back then.

Yeah, >68 degrees is too hot for Yale, but it's old and that probably has a lot to do with it. I remember alternately freezing and roasting in classrooms at MIT. I think there's some universal law that says classrooms can't be comfortable.

This: Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? I used to work with some pretty smart Norwegians. They were never cold.

I don't believe the people who run Yale claimed that. Nice strawman though.

Uh oh. Are you saying the people who run Yale might be Global Warming Deniers? Somebody notify Charles Johnson, we need to expose these anti-climate change charlatans before any more innocent polar bears are murdered.

The Concord woods have changed since naturalist Henry David Thoreau strolled among the trees around Walden Pond, jotting down careful observations of the plants there.

Drawing on Thoreau’s detailed notes from the mid-19th century, a team of local researchers has been looking for the imprint of climate change in New England. Now the team reports that invasive and nonnative plants in Concord are more adept than native species at responding to earlier spring thaws and warmer temperatures by changing when they flower. That means, the scientists conclude, that global warming may be advantageous to invasive and nonnative plants, with their ability to flower early possibly giving them an edge they need to thrive and spread.

Metaphorically speaking, however, between the native and invasive species, which is the hardy savage and which is the civilized man?

If Yale's buildings are anything like the schools I went to, a thermostat setting of 68 deg F means almost nothing in terms of actual ambient temperature. Some offices will end up at 80 while drafty classrooms never get above 60.

In my graduate school the facilities people put a locked cover over the thermostat on one floor of the art building because students kept turning up the dial. And for good reason. Any room with windows was freezing.

It was always too warm in Stiles College, my residential college (which is to say, my dorm, more or less) at Yale.

I'd say it was above 75 degrees, maybe even above 80, much of the time.

I always theorized that Stiles administrators hailed from some unholy place and were used to the heat. But reading this post, I realize that maybe my theory applies to Yale administrators more generally.

Faced with dire financial situations, some institutions of higher learning are considering declaring a state of financial exigency, allowing them to change working conditions and compensation for tenured faculty.

The Las Vegas Sun reports that the Board of Regents will today consider declaring a financial emergency which will lead to pay reductions, furloughs and layoffs. The move is in response to anticipated state budget cuts of at least 20 percent, in addition to the reductions which have already taken place. This is the first time in nearly 40 years that the board has considered resorting to such a drastic step."

"Dan Klaich, Nevada’s higher education chancellor, told the system’s governing Board of Regents the state is facing the worst economic shortfall in anyone’s memory, nearly $1 billion. This will mean either massive cuts to every aspect of government, or woefully unpopular tax increases. Or both.

Klaich outlined three scenarios that would cut that much from the system:

1. Close Nevada State College and the College of Southern Nevada.

2. Close Great Basin College, Truckee Meadows Community College, Desert Research Institute, UNLV’s law and dental schools, and the system’s medical school.

3. Close the state college, Great Basin, Truckee Meadows, Western Nevada College, all athletics at the two universities and the agricultural experiment station at UNR.

What I don't understand is why people don't just use salary cuts. 10% across the board, say, until things get better. Instead, the most they're doing is freezing salaries for a comparatively small group (deans and officers). Wouldn't it be better -- from a welfare maximising perspective -- to fire as few people as possible, and just cut everyone's salaries?

We've gone through the same thing in the DC area with WMATA, where WMATA's management presented the public with alternatives that included firing a lot of WMATA staff and cutting loads of services or hitting up state governments (who have no money) for more money. The most obvious solution -- one implemented by many private employers, including my own -- is a salary cut. But for whatever reason, it just wasn't on the table. They'd rather fire people than cut salaries.

Published: February 18, 2009ATLANTA"On Tuesday, Morris Brown College, one of a cluster of historically black institutions here, narrowly averted having its water shut off for the second time this school year by paying $150,000 toward an outstanding bill of more than $200,000.

At Clark Atlanta University, officials this month cut back on faculty, staff and class offerings.But the college is not yet in the clear financially: It is down to 151 students and is $30 million in debt."

Doesn't Yale have a big honkin' endowment, like the other Ivy League schools? Assuming they do, they just need to sell some of it. That's what you do if you can't meet cash flow but own some assets. These guys need an intervention by Dave Ramsey.

From the same NY Times article:"Colleges and universities of all kinds across the country are facing shrunken endowments, decreased giving and government cutbacks, and many have reduced their payroll and list of classes."

And in St. Paul, Minn. MPR January 8, 2009"Legislators asked representatives from the University of Minnesota and MnSCU what might happen if they lost hundreds of millions of dollars in funding as the state works to balance its nearly $5 billion deficit.

And I do not believe that the people who run Yale think that there's such a thing as anthropogenic global warming worth worrying a damn about. In fact, if you actually thought cutting carbon emissions was important, your thermostats would already be at 62° or lower. If you thought AGW is an emergency — of the sort Al Gore warns us about —you'd set the thermostat at 52° or lower.

As the InstaPundit says, "I'll believe global warming is an emergency when the people who claim it's an emergency start acting like it's an emergency."

Let's just hope they don't get completely stupid about it. Back in the early 1970s when Nixon ordered the thermostats in government buildings set to 68 degrees, my brother was in the Navy stationed in Hawaii. They saluted smartly and turned the thermostats to 68 degrees - for their air conditioned computer rooms. Computers give off a lot of heat and often need air conditioning all year.

And yet, in this age of digital information, with tons less paper and books and waste, you might think that the cost of teaching that information would go down, or that it could be transmitted to more students at the same cost, or that some other kind of efficiency would be attained....schools losing money can only be explained by poor management and/or selfish agendas.

In fact, I've always felt like the higher-education racket is worthy of an expose. If Michael Moore were ever to do one of his jobs that I could agree with, it would be a look at who's getting rich at the university level.

Management in private industry does cost cutting like taking out the garbage: it's expected, it's required it's constant and it accomplished. That's what competition and the lack of government money does.

Yale is a school for gentlemen songsters off on a spree. They don't bake. Even the Yalettes eschew anything remotely connected with home ec. And it's clear you didn't get the memo -- that AGW silliness is for the little people, while 68 degrees definitely will not cut it for gentlemen songsters. Do you have any idea what it would do to the Voice?

Folks from fly-over country are unlikely to get it. Palladian, proud Yalie and NYC denizen that he is, can explain it all to you.

Doesn't Yale have a big honkin' endowment, like the other Ivy League schools?

Not just Ivy League but state schools too. I brought this up some time ago and was informed by a university staff employee that many if not all endowments are for specific schools, departments or research and can’t simply be used for general operating costs. That’s understandable since the grantors of t he endowment probably would not want their gift to end supporting transgendered art research or some other such idiotic drivel universities seem to thrive on these days.

That all being said, it is ironic that schools are sitting on tens and in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments yet are fiscally in the red.

And yet, in this age of digital information, with tons less paper and books and waste, you might think that the cost of teaching that information would go down

One might think that. Then again wasn't Ward Churchill making somewhere in the neighborhood of $150K a year? That's not a bad salary for a guy who was elevated to the position of associate professor despite not having a doctorate and was nothing more than a fraud.

Good point, Hoosier. But if the crisis is real, you'd think some clever lawyers could figure out a way to use those endowments somehow (a loan, perhaps?).

I don't know Mike. I'm guessing that the grantors of those endowments had some real clever lawyers crafting the terms. I know if I was filthy rich and wanted to grant and endowment for say, the history department at IU, I would make damn sure it could not be used to promote a 2 semester study on the Vagina Monologues.

Agree 100%, but the grantees could be approached to see what they'd be willing to do. For example, if a grant is made in the name of engineering research, but the school is laying off engineering faculty, there ain't much research that's going to get done.

I thought it was interesting in the article that one of the cost-cutting measures was to have people making north of $83K pay more for their health insurance. More of that to come in the future for everyone.

I think letting all the Associate Deans go would save money too. Keep all the Deans and all the Assistant Deans, just get rid of one layer.

I've posted this before but I truly believe this quote from Ghostbusters pretty much sums up much of the mindset of academaia, at least from my observation from attending undergrad and grad school.

Dr Ray Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*.

For example, if a grant is made in the name of engineering research, but the school is laying off engineering faculty

For those who think that couldn't happen, I can report a counter example. An old pal of mine was tenured faculty at a large Catholic school in the Midwest -- Duke Reagan figures in a movie once made about it. The university decided to close down his department, and he had to go looking for work.

garage mahal suggests that to critique the people who run Yale on the grounds of their behavior being at odds with their belief in AGW is to engage in a straw man attack. Nevertheless, it doesn't take much looking around the Yale website to discover that the university has an greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Needless to say, it is not a straw man argument to critique Yale's leadership for failing to take the issue seriously if that is where the thermostats are set.

On the other hand, as other commenters have pointed out, old buildings are often poorly insulated or poorly ventilated, so a thermostat setting of 68 might result in an actual room temperature of 62 in those buildings. And sustainable or not, I can't imagine that Yale thinks it does its image any favors to keep the temperature in its buildings so low that prospective students think that the place is struggling to keep the buildings heated.

After bouncing around between suburban Detroit and suburban Milwaukee, working for various automotive suppliers, he now works for a computer company in the Southwest. People still cite the research he did as a grad student and college professor, though.

Radiative heat transfer is one reason people turn up the heat in cold climates. Generally the room air heats you inefficiently, via conduction, maybe convection if the air is moving rapidly enough.

But if the walls and windows are cold, your body heat transfers to them quite efficiently even though the air should be "warm enough". Insulating the walls and windows with low e materials will make you warmer. Radiative heat transfer makes sitting in front of a fireplace more satisfying than sitting over a hot air register.

Generally the room air heats you inefficiently, via conduction, maybe convection if the air is moving rapidly enough.

It's been my observation that the room isn't actually heating you. Rather, you are maintaining your temperature and not losing heat to the environment (We have a cold house, maybe that colors my observations).

Conduction and convection generally remove heat from my body in our house. The amount of heat I'm radiating is constant, because my radiating temperature is pretty much constant. The way to stay warm is to reduce conductive heat loss -- and that's achieved by layers that trap air, because air is a poor conductor of heat. Once conduction warms the thin layer of air surrounding your body, convection moves it away and your body starts warming it again. It's very hard to stop that convective heat loss. It's not as hard to slow the conduction that is fueling it.

It's been my observation that the room isn't actually heating you. Rather, you are maintaining your temperature and not losing heat to the environment (We have a cold house, maybe that colors my observations).

Please tell me that you aren't the one responsible for UW's climate modelling. ;-)

You are correct. If the room is colder than you, it is not heating you. What's heating you is your breakfast. The room temperature determines your rate of heat loss.

But don't trust me. Freder will be along any moment to explain it to us.

"I don't believe the people who run Yale claimed that. Nice strawman though.

Hmm...I wonder why they offer this then...

Climate change solutions require leadership from all sectors of society. Through the Yale F&ES Project on Climate Change, recommended Action Items have emerged for each of the influential areas listed below. We invite you to join us in exploring these ideas and recommendations. Project Participants can hold discussions on this site, contribute ideas, and help implement key actions. Sign up to learn more about becoming a project participant or action item leader.

WV - "uniaboo" - nowhere near as funny as Harvey Birdman's "Unabooboo" in which Yogi's sidekick becomes a mail bomber after Jellystone Park goes corporate. During the episode we learn that not only is BooBoo gay, but Yogi never learned to read.

That's how it was at my job at International Paper, years ago. Employee contributions to health insurance were determined by income. The more you made, the more you paid. I thought that was fair. As long as it is in the private sector, that is.

RE the thermostat and colleges. I went to Rice, in Houston. They kept the buildings freezing. I took a sweatshirt and socks to class with me, then would remove them to sweat in the Houston heat. My dorm room was so cold that I would leave the door open to warm up. What a waste of energy. At least my tuition was only about $3,400 a year.

Even in north Florida I wear short-sleeve shirts year-round. Everywhere you go in the "winter" around here it is too hot for anything else. We still have not even turned our home system to heat yet. I've figured out I won't die between the car and where I'm going.

The heating is unreal in American apartments- its 36 degrees outside in NYC as I write, we haven't turned the fans on in our heater so far this winter, I am getting around in bare feet and t-shirt, and I have three windows opened an inch. (an Aussie in NYC)

I'd like to thank whoever it was that invented thermal underwear. I don't need it much, but when needed it's great.

We keep our house at 65 in the winter and 78. If we didn't have temperature sensitive pets we'd change those.

Also, the first thing we did after buying the house was insulate the heck out of it. If I'd realized how [relatively] inexpensive ground thermal heating/cooling was 10 years ago I would have done that instead of getting top efficiency furnace and A/C.

I'd like to thank whoever it was that invented thermal underwear. I don't need it much, but when needed it's great.

We keep our house at 65 in the winter and 78. If we didn't have temperature sensitive pets we'd change those.

Also, the first thing we did after buying the house was insulate the heck out of it. If I'd realized how [relatively] inexpensive ground thermal heating/cooling was 10 years ago I would have done that instead of getting top efficiency furnace and A/C.

"Yale is a school for gentlemen songsters off on a spree. They don't bake. Even the Yalettes eschew anything remotely connected with home ec. And it's clear you didn't get the memo -- that AGW silliness is for the little people, while 68 degrees definitely will not cut it for gentlemen songsters. Do you have any idea what it would do to the Voice?

Folks from fly-over country are unlikely to get it. Palladian, proud Yalie and NYC denizen that he is, can explain it all to you."

Richard's right. There is a lot of singing going on up there. Every male undergraduate belongs to some sort of singing club or group. I can't tell you the number of shows, performances, evenings at Mory's that I attended... Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, Whiffenpoofs, you name it. Love (I was passionately in love with a lad in one of those groups) makes you endure terrible, terrible things. I can still sing along with "Bright College Years".

"Hey the good news is the Div School now has an Ag program so they're buying local!"

Whoa! Good to hear that the Divinity School is actually plowing something besides each other. Everyone I ever met from the Div School (I lived at that end of the campus) was a homosexual atheist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I will say that, although our house is cold cold cold -- 55 at night, more like 45 or 50 upstairs -- I have an electric mattress pad. Heavenly. I don't like climbing into ice cold sheets and I never have to again.

The problem here is the endowment. They cranked up spending to exceed the $50k they charge the students paying full boat to cover more administrators, higher salaries, and a lot of scholarships for those less able to pay (after all, diversity is an extraordinarily important goal of schools like Yale).

BUT, they are second to Harvard in the amount that their endowments cratered this last year. We are talking a big percentage, plus a lot of billions of dollars.

They could probably make their costs if they were to eliminate need based scholarships, but that would mean that the administrators could not continue to push up the percentage of people of color at the school. Indeed, they may have to drop some of those scholarships, and that would cause the school to revert to when John Kerry, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton attended there (Bill may have had a scholarship, given his family situation).

A lot of schools at the top have tried to take a need-neutral approach to admissions, which means a lot of scholarships. And, even before this crash in endowments, the lower down you go from the top, the harder it was to get need based scholarships (or any help except for high priced loans).

Of those options for NV above, the one that is not going to fly is eliminating the UN law and medical schools. And, those pushing those as an option know that. There are just too many UNLV attorneys in prominent places in NV, and the medical school means that the state is not without some stature.

Junior colleges though are fine to dump. Those in the legislature are much less likely to have attended them.

Yale and Harvard could both give every student they have a free education, plus books, and room and board and still have billions left in their endowments. This story is a farce and the university system in this country as a function of finance is even moreso.